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788 Robert Shelford (ca.1563–1638/39) Shelford was presumably a poor man’s son, since he entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, as a sizar (in modern parlance, a work-study student), serving as Bible-clerk and amanuensis to Peterhouse’s master, the proto–Anglo-Catholic Andrew Perne (1519–89).1 He took his BA in 1584, proceeding MA in 1587, the same year he was ordained. In 1599 Sir Thomas Egerton granted him the rectory of Ringsfield in the northeast corner of Suffolk, where Shelford served for nearly four decades. His one publication other than the Discourses was a 1596 treatise on children’s education (reprinted in 1602 and 1606). His memorial tablet in the Ringsfield church describes him as unmarried (coelebs). [\ Five learned and pious discourses was printed at Cambridge in 1635, with prefatory verses by Richard Crashaw. Its sustained critique of English Calvinist orthodoxies—in the sermon reprinted here, the glorification of preaching as the chief, if not sole, ordinary means of salvation—elicited Archbishop Ussher’s outraged protest that “such rotten stuff” smacked of Perne’s teaching (ODNB), a comment that casts interesting light on the Tudor prehistory of Laudianism.2 For, as the portions of Shelford’s book reprinted below (including Crashaw’s verses) make evident, the Discourses is a Laudian work. Yet Shelford is Shakespeare’s contemporary, and his book reminded Ussher of Perne, who grew up in pre-Reformation England, not of newfangled Caroline divinity. Moreover, although forty years his senior, Shelford at points sounds very much like Laud’s godson, William Chillingworth , and the points at which Shelford anticipates Chillingworth are precisely those at which Chillingworth sounds very much like Milton’s Areopagitica: the points at which Shelford upholds the authority of the individual conscience, argues for the spiritual and moral autonomy of the laity, and defends their capacity to understand the fundamental and essential parts of Scripture and their Christian liberty to read it for themselves. The 1 See Collinson, “Perne.” 2 See Tyacke 53–56; MacCulloch 17; Shuger 608–9, 617–18; Collinson, “Perne”). 789 Robert Shelford obvious question then arises as to how such seemingly Miltonic moments can possibly cohere with Shelford’s sacramentalism and sacerdotalism, his Caroline royalism, his Laudian churchmanship. To grasp their coherence is to grasp Shelford’s central claim: that the holy enters this world at multiple sites. The pulpit is not the only channel of grace, for God is present in nature, in families, in Scripture, in the public reading of common prayer and the private reading of printed sermons, in the sacraments, in the Christian social order of Stuart England, in its “godly governors,” as also in the voice of the indwelling Spirit and the dictates of the individual conscience.3 This multiplicity of sacral loci disallows the invidious contrast between Christ’s little flock and the merely civil religion of the majority (or the sub-Christian religion of the village),4 as it likewise disallows Milton’s heroic individualism . Shelford urges the spiritual autonomy of laypersons vis-à-vis dogmatic preachers, not in relation to their neighbors or their culture or their families or their rulers, these being, no less than one’s own conscience and reason, ordinary, although neither invariable nor infallible, ministers of the word—as are, on occasion, even one’s servants. [\ Sources: ODNB; Patrick Collinson, “Perne the turncoat: an Elizabethan reputation,” Elizabethan essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 179–218; Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The myth of the English Reformation,” JBS 30.1 (1991): 1–19; Shuger, “Protesting”; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists. 3 Note that this insistence on a plurality of sacral loci is formally akin to the argument of Laud’s Conference with Fisher that our assurance that Scripture is the word of God rests not, contra both Catholic and Calvinist teaching, on some one infallible basis but instead on the conjoined witness of tradition , grace, authority, and reason. 4 This contrast is endemic to godly Calvinism (vide the scholarship of Christopher Haigh on this point), but also, as the Everard selections indicate, to antinomianism. Two notorious antinomian ministers —Eaton at Wickham Market and Eachard at Darsham—had parishes within twenty miles of Shelford’s Ringsfield. ...

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